Section 5: My Experience with an Electric Vehicle
Introduction
Numbers are powerful. Data matters. Sometimes the convincing story is the one lived.
This section is mine. A curious skeptic, then a driver, then someone who would not go back. It covers three cars in the driveway and a fourth that has since left, close to 190,000 electric miles, road trips, Florida heat, cold-weather runs, frustrations, and the slow collapse of what I thought I knew about cars. The 140,000-mile mark was a waypoint, the figure in an earlier draft and in a video. The odometer did not stop there.
This is not a sales pitch. It is what ownership has actually been. The annoyances are real. They are small next to what an internal combustion engine (ICE) does to the air people breathe. If burning fuel is harmless, explain the closed garage. Do not start that engine with the door down. Think it through.
The 2017 Bolt EV — The Beginning
I bought my first electric car in 2019, a used 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV. It had just over 5,000 miles on it at CarMax in Sanford, Florida. I had watched every electric-vehicle (EV) video I could find. I still did not know what to expect. The goal was simple. Stop spending $225 to $250 a month on gasoline.
Then I was driving past gas stations. Plugging in at home. Noticing how smooth the car was, and wondering why nobody had said so.
The Bolt was quirky. No adaptive cruise, a stiff ride, a plain cabin. It had a bit over 200 miles of range, enough for a short trip and more than enough for a 100-mile commute, five days a week. On weekends my wife and I went to the beaches, to Walt Disney World, Universal, and SeaWorld, and to restaurants from St. Augustine to Cocoa Beach to Tampa, without a gas stop.
Road-Trip Reality Check
From 2019 to 2022, fast charging in central Florida was patchy. My Bolt did not have the direct-current fast-charge option, so the highway stalls were not my problem. A Level 2 charger was, and there were enough of those from coast to coast for the trips we took. I still sat through broken stations and rerouted plans. That taught me what the next car needed.
I learned how to:
1. Plan the stop before I needed it.
2. Use regenerative braking instead of the pedal.
3. Find the speed where the range stopped falling off a cliff.
An EV trip can be pleasant. A charge at a park or a small town is a different stop than a gas-station island. You are in the place, not beside a pump.
Upgrading to the 2023 Bolt EUV
By early 2023 we wanted more comfort and more of the modern equipment. The 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV arrived in February. It is the Bolt’s roomier sibling, and it can fast-charge, slowly by later standards.
1. Super Cruise, hands-free on mapped highways.
2. More room, a calmer ride, a better screen.
3. Heated and ventilated seats, and a 360-degree camera.
It became the commuter and the long-distance car. Cold trips, Florida summers, fast-charge stops. It is still a workhorse, and still one of the underrated EVs, now also easy to find used.
Years in, the service list was tires, coolant, wiper blades, and one front-end alignment. No oil. No transmission service. No engine repair.
My wife was still in a 2016 Honda Accord. A good gasoline car. Not the point.
The Ioniq 5, Then the Model Y
In 2024 I brought home a Hyundai Ioniq 5. An 800-volt crossover. On a working high-power stall it could go from 10 percent to 80 percent in under 20 minutes. A wide cabin, reclining seats, a real driver-assistance suite, and a rated range over 300 miles. It replaced the Accord, not the Bolt.
My wife put most of the miles on it, a commute plus the grandbaby’s ballet, swimming, and gymnastics. Public charging was the new part. I gave her radio-frequency identification (RFID) cards so she was not juggling apps. What she liked first: she did not have to stop for gas. What she liked second: she was not spending about $250 a month on it.
The Ioniq 5 lease came back early, in 2026. The car that replaced it is a Tesla Model Y Premium, rear-wheel drive, Marine Blue. It is her daily driver. Rated range on that trim is 357 miles, and Supercharging does not ask her to open an app. Plug and Charge, which was “almost here” when this chapter was first drafted, is ordinary on that network. She pulls up and plugs in.
I still commute in the Bolt EUV. The household is two electric cars, not a mixed driveway.
Close to 190,000 Miles Later
Across the Bolt, the Bolt EUV, the Ioniq 5, and now the Model Y, the electric miles are closer to 190,000 than to the 140,000 in the old draft. What has held up:
1. The cars have been reliable. Fewer powertrain problems than the gasoline cars I owned.
2. Charging at home became the routine. The public stall is the trip, not the Tuesday.
3. The maintenance savings are real. Through the records I kept, almost $10,000 against what AAA and Consumer Reports put on a gasoline car, before counting fuel. [1]
4. Range anxiety faded. It fades when you know the car.
5. You notice energy. The meter, the trip, the weather.
6. The fuel bill moved. Two gasoline cars were about $400 to $450 a month. The extra electricity, about 1,100 to 1,500 kilowatt-hours a month, ran about $130 to $180. The difference was about $300 to $350 a month. Those are our rates and our miles, not a national promise.
Conclusion
I used to think of a car as a tool from point A to point B. I think of it now as part of a larger account: efficiency, the air, and whether the trip had to set something on fire.
If burning fuel still sounds like the settled way to move, read the old doubts about the car itself. One line, treated as folklore and still useful:
“The automobile is a passing fad. Horses are here to stay.”
— Advice to Horace Rackham, later an early Ford investor, attributed to the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, about 1903. Often called apocryphal. The attitude is not.
I follow Mark P. Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Both have taken fossil-fuel money. That is context, not a substitute for reading him. One line of his:
“There’s no such thing, of course, as a zero-emissions vehicle. The real question is, where are the emissions associated with the electric car? Because what you do with an electric vehicle is you don’t eliminate emissions; you export them somewhere else.”
— Mark P. Mills, “The ‘Energy Transition’ Delusion: A Reality Reset,” Manhattan Institute, August 30, 2022.
He is right that an EV is not a zero-emission object today. On the U.S. grid, a large share of the electricity is still natural gas and coal, so some of the pollution is at the power plant instead of the tailpipe. What the line leaves out:
1. The car uses about a third to a quarter of the energy a gasoline car uses to go the same mile. On a fossil-heavy grid the climate emissions are lower, not zero. They are not “the same pollution, moved.”
2. The grid gets cleaner under the car. A gasoline car cannot.
3. A battery car can reach a day when the mile is close to clean. A car that burns fuel cannot. Not in any universe.
Another line:
“Tesla will fix its cold-weather woes, but an all-EV future is still dead on arrival.”
— Mark P. Mills, “Tapping the Brakes on Electric Vehicles,” City Journal, January 29, 2024.
That is the banker’s horse, a century later. Cold weather costs range. It does not end the car. Norway’s new-car market is almost entirely electric, and Norway is not Florida.
I did not set out to argue for this. I wanted a car that made sense. Then I could not keep it to myself.
And here you are, reading this. So maybe the ripple is still moving.
Footnotes
1. Personal maintenance and energy records from EV ownership beginning in 2019, set against average gasoline-car maintenance costs reported by AAA and Consumer Reports. The mileage total in this chapter is the household electric odometer as of late 2026, close to 190,000, not the 140,000-mile figure used in an earlier draft and in a video recorded before that.
